Our Alliance
GW’s Dynamic Hub for Research, Collaboration and Knowledge to Address Our Planet’s Greatest Challenges
The GW Alliance for a Sustainable Future serves as a dynamic hub that brings together institutes, academic programs, organizations, initiatives, and individuals across disciplines to amplify their impact. Working with GW’s schools and colleges, the Alliance takes on the most challenging problems to inform policy, help people and planet, foster innovation, and teach the leaders of the future.
Assuring a healthy and equitable future for all is a generational calling. Today’s students make that clear every day. They are acutely aware the world faces unprecedented challenges and accelerating change. They know their future is tied inextricably to the planet’s health, and that politics are deeply polarized. They feel a sense of urgency and want to contribute to solutions.
The George Washington University and the Alliance for a Sustainable Future is ideally positioned to lead this call for action. By bringing together our teaching, research, and unrivaled power to convene across interests and disciplines in Washington, DC, GW can help envision and invent a truly sustainable future.
Frank Sesno
Executive Director, GW Alliance for a Sustainable Future
Our Mission
To catalyze, amplify, and support the work of GW’s schools, faculty, and students to make GW a primary source for sustainability knowledge, education, and engagement and a globally recognized leader in sustainability.
Our Ethos
Collaborate
to foster work across disciplines, departments, and sectors. We bring together faculty, students, researchers, practitioners, and external partners to drive research, learning, and solutions. This is especially important at a time of political polarization.
Communicate
to share knowledge, inspire innovation, and engage diverse audiences. We teach our community how to communicate data and complex ideas in clear, compelling ways. We foster communication through high-level convenings and compelling storytelling.
Navigate
to get things done. Scholars, students, and problem-solvers must know how to overcome obstacles and build coalitions to implement solutions. Drawing on GW’s rich culture of public service, we connect impact-driven research with actionable strategies to advance policy and serve people.
Our Priorities
Serve as GW’s sustainability hub for collaboration, information, and opportunity. The Alliance works in close partnership with GW’s schools, departments, institutes and initiatives to maximize existing resources while creating new opportunities.
Catalyze cross-disciplinary, actionable research that informs policy. The Alliance prioritizes cross-disciplinary research. By connecting faculty across disciplines to catalyze new collaboration through the Sustainability Research Institute, we’re facilitating new grant proposals and providing seed grants to assist with foundational support.
Foster teaching, experiential learning, and career development opportunities. Coordinating with GW’s schools and colleges, we’re working to help grow academic and degree programs that will attract new students and ensure that our graduates are positioned for leadership roles in the economy of the future.
Engage sustainability leaders to tackle the world’s most pressing challenges. Addressing planetary challenges requires us to bring together academics, advocates, alumni, experts, and decision-makers to exchange information and engage in meaningful conversation and debate. The Alliance draws on GW’s unique advantages and relationships to convene and build a collaborative network with leaders in government, business, NGOs, think tanks, nonprofits, and media.
The Sustainability Research Institute
The Sustainability Research Institute is catalyzing new relationships and research, and reimagining the traditional routes for funding for major new initiatives.
Supported by seed grants, the SRI has developed faculty research communities, chaired by “Research Champions,” to focus three faculty-driven and evolving thematic areas:
- Energy, Technology, and Decision-Making
- Cities, Communities, and Infrastructure
- Planetary Well-Being and Civic Life
Academic Programs
Our academic programs are designed to expand sustainability education opportunities through the minor, graduate degrees, and other programs to create a high-value talent pool of sustainability-informed professionals across a wide spectrum of careers.
We have developed signature opportunities for students and faculty, including Living Learning Communities, and connected students and alumni to the rapidly growing “green jobs” economy of the future.
Engagement and Convening
With GW and the Alliance for a Sustainable Future’s far-reaching expertise, we amplify relationships and impact from the heart of Washington D.C.
We are fostering a culture of interdisciplinary collaboration by convening sustainability-focused gatherings that bring together GW faculty, students, and external partners.
Communication
GW has a dramatic story to tell. It is our priority to highlight GW’s accomplishments and breakthroughs, its faculty, students and alumni. Building on the Planet Forward model and telling these innovative stories, the Alliance is uplifting a narrative that will attract new research and philanthropy and the best faculty and students.
Our Path Forward
The Alliance for a Sustainable Future is a bold initiative that draws on our university’s strengths, our location, and our vision for a more equitable and sustainable world.
As we collaborate, communicate, and navigate for impact, we will create opportunities and new knowledge. We will educate the next generation of problem-solvers as we inspire innovation and creativity. We will bring people together across interests and disciplines to build the sustainable future we seek.